Shelter from the Storm

Thursday, August 17, 2017

California Today: A Growing Threat on the Shoreline

The Pacific has been gobbling up the California coast with growing voraciousness.

A study
this year by the United States Geological Survey predicted that as much
as two thirds of Southern California’s beaches could be lost by the end
of the century.

Among the variables, said Patrick Barnard, a geologist and author of the report, are rising seas and intensified storms, both linked to climate change, as well as hundreds of river dams that are blocking the flow of sand to beaches.

It all spells trouble for buildings and homes perched along the shore.

The peril grew vivid last year in Pacifica, a seaside city just south of San Francisco. Widely shared drone footageshowed apartment buildings poised at the edge of a cliff as mounds of dirt crumbled from its face and into the ocean.

Dr.
Barnard, of the United States Geological Survey, said California could
expect to see such dramas unfold with increasing regularity, even if the
models can’t yet make long-range predictions about any given beach or
cliff.

“The
open question on the climate side is, ‘How quickly is this going to
happen? Is it going to be 30 years or 50 years?’” he said. “But we know
it’s happening. And we know it’s coming.”

David L. Ulin on Revisiting Hiroshima, and the Dark, Empty Rhetoric of the President

If you want to know why
reading matters, here, perhaps, is a reminder of a kind. Last Wednesday
morning, 24 hours after the Donald Trump twice invoked the image of fire
and fury in regard to North Korea, I stumbled across the text of John
Hersey’s Hiroshima online.

Stumbled? No, that’s not right, not exactly, although my emotional
and political life has come to feel increasingly like an exercise in
careening, ricocheting from one crisis to another, at the mercy of a
chief executive who may or may not be delusional but is at the very
least dangerously inept. A few weeks ago, a friend—another writer—asked
what I was working on, and when I stumbled (that word again) for an
answer, she smiled reassuringly and responded, “I know. How can you work
when you need an update on the state of the world every ten minutes to
help keep things in check?”

There’s an element of magical thinking to that exchange, with its
implication that knowledge, or so we’re desperate to imagine, might
offer us a bit of power. If you want to know just how wishful such a
notion is, spend some time with Hiroshima. Hersey’s small book,
30,000 words, was first published on August 31, 1946, little more than a
year after the bomb was dropped; it filled an entire issue of The New Yorker
front to back. In clear, concise prose, the author tracks the effects
of the nuclear attack there—the first time atomic weapons were ever used
on a civilian population—through the lens of six residents of the city
who survived.

Let’s recall their names here: Kiyoshi Tanimoto, Hatsuyo Nakamura,
Masakazu Fujii, Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Terufumi Sasaki, and Toshiko Sasaki.
Four men, two women. Two doctors, a priest, a pastor, a widow, a clerk.
All of them survived by the grace of circumstance; the indifference of
the universe can cut both ways. By the time all the dying was finished,
as many as 146,000 people were eradicated in Hiroshima, more than half
the population, which had been, Hersey tells us, “reduced by several
evacuation programs from a wartime peak of 380,000 to about 245,000.”
There had been air raid warnings, and a curious, discomfiting absence of
raids by American B-29 bombers, referred to by the Japanese as “B-san,
or Mr. B.” As Hersey writes, in the second paragraph of his narrative:
“The frequency of the warnings and the continued abstinence of Mr. B
with respect to Hiroshima had made its citizens jittery; a rumor was
going around that the Americans were saving something special for the
city.”

Something special for the city. Something special, indeed. The power of Hiroshima,
however, resides in its matter-of-factness, the idea that we are
watching, or participating in, a timeline—that in a very real sense this
is just another day. Hersey makes that explicit by beginning before the
blast, establishing his characters, their daily struggle: the
exhaustion of living in a constant state of war. He’s not interested in
allies or enemies, what the bombing did or didn’t mean strategically,
how (or whether) it helped to end the war. Rather, his concern is the
human drama—a Neighborhood Association chairman “organizing air-raid
defense for about 20 families,” a mother trying to let her children
sleep. Even after the devastation, he keeps his focus sharp, specific,
zeroing in on individuals, evoking the bigger picture by first tracing
the small. “After the terrible flash,” he observes, “—which, Father
Kleinsorge later realized, reminded him of something he had read as a
boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth—he had time (since he
was 1,400 yards from the center) for one thought: A bomb has fallen
directly on us. Then, for a few seconds or minutes, he went out of his
mind.”

What Hersey is describing is a state of dislocation, a reality so
incomprehensible it is difficult to process, let alone believe. At the
same time, it is reality, which remains the most astonishing
aspect of his minimalist masterpiece. The post-atomic landscape of
Hiroshima is not post-apocalyptic; everywhere are recognizable
signifiers of mercy or loss.

For Dr. Fujii, whose clinic has fallen into the Kyo River, it’s the
instant he notices “a nurse hanging in the timbers of his hospital by
her legs, and then another painfully pinned across the breast. He
enlisted the help of some of the others under the bridge and freed both
of them. He thought he heard the voice of his niece for a moment, but he
could not find her; he never saw her again.” For Tanimoto, it’s the
burden of not being injured: “All the way he overtook dreadfully burned
and lacerated people, and in his guilt he turned to right and left as he
hurried and said to some of them, ‘Excuse me for having no burden like
yours.’” For Toshiko Sasaki, the blast leaves her buried in her office
beneath a set of fallen bookcases. “There, in the tin factory,” Hersey
observes drily, “in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being
was crushed by books.” The implication is clear—that literature or
community or religion, the emblems of our civilization, cannot save us.
Still, somehow we (or at least the six individuals of whom Hersey
writes) are saved, or at least persevere.

And yet, do we really? Or perhaps a better question is: What are
salvation’s terms? Is it simply a matter of breathing, of going through
the motions, or is it a function of humanity? Hersey steers clear of
politics—which is, of course, a political decision, especially so close
after the war. To portray, in 1946, the suffering of Japanese civilians
is akin to what Swedish journalist Stig Dagerman offers in his book German Autumn,
a series of dispatches, written late that same year, from the ruined
landscapes of the former Reich. “Of the cruelties of the past practiced
by Germans in and out of Germany there can only be one opinion, since of
cruelty in general, of whatever kind and whoever practices it, there
can be only one opinion,” Dagerman insists. “But it is another matter to
ask if it is now right, if it is not indeed a cruelty, to regard the
sufferings of the Germans as justified.” Empathy, in other words, which
also sits, as it must, at the heart of Hiroshima. The
devastation is always personal, and we have no choice but to leave
pieces of ourselves behind. “It’s funny,” says a theological student as
he waits out the aftermath of the bombing, “but things don’t matter
anymore. Yesterday, my shoes were my most important possessions. Today, I
don’t care. One pair is enough.”

I feel the same, although shoes are not my weakness, and no bombs
have fallen on me. But make no mistake about it, we are in a war. Not
with North Korea, but with ourselves, with the part of ourselves that
would lay waste to everything rather than acknowledge who and what we
are. Look at Charlottesville, where a different kind of bomb went off
this past weekend, as sure as I am sitting here. Look at Bedminster, New
Jersey, where our chickenhawk of a president—he of the five deferments,
who once boasted that avoiding STDs in the 1980s and 1990s had been “my
personal Vietnam, I feel like a great and very brave soldier”—couldn’t,
or didn’t want to, say the words “white supremacist” or “terrorist.”

What Hiroshima has to tell us is that words make a
difference, that they can not only illuminate our situation, but also
help us frame a response. For that to happen, though, we need to be
clear about what we are facing, clear about what we see.

I didn’t awaken on Wednesday intending to re-read Hersey’s book, and I
wouldn’t describe the experience as a consoling one. But then,
consolation is not what we need. More important is inevitability, the
notion that certain acts, certain decisions, once undertaken, can never
be undone. Despite (or perhaps because of) all our rhetoric, we remain
the only nation ever to use atomic weapons on another; the morning I
spent with Hiroshima was the 72nd anniversary of the second
bomb to fall on Japan, the Nagasaki bomb, which killed another 80,000, a
third of the people who lived there. Think about that, wherever you are
standing: Look to your right and to your left and do the human math.
I live in Los Angeles, one of the cities said to be targeted if the
situation with North Korea escalates.

As to what this means, who’s to
say? Hersey, for his part, suggests the only answer that matters: the
human answer. Fire and fury? There’s nothing heroic about a nuclear
strike; even the survivors are condemned. “A year after the bomb was
dropped,” Hersey writes, “Miss Sasaki was a cripple; Mrs. Nakamura was
destitute; Father Kleinsorge was back in the hospital; Dr. Sasaki was
not capable of the work he once could do; Dr. Fujii had lost the 30-room
hospital it took him many years to acquire, and had no prospects of
rebuilding it; Mr. Tanimoto’s church had been ruined and he no longer
had his exceptional vitality. The lives of these six people, who were
among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same.”

About Me

This is a blog about what interests me. Here you will find stories on animals, including animal rights material, cute stuff, and random informative posts about weird, beautiful and interesting creatures. Horses, Spotted Hyenas, and Border Collies will make regular appearances.
Also prominently featured will be posts about the Arts. Animation, photography, and the traditional forms, plus "outsider art," film and books.
Other things that will surface here are Japan & the Japanese, John Oliver, surfing, skateboarding and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, interesting places and structures,and my own art, writing and photography.
There will be rants. It's an election year, and I am beginning to have a political dimension to my personality. I am also horrified at the level of injustice and violence visited upon people here in the US and elsewhere - particularly against people of color, immigrants, and the LGBT community. Some of these stories will be very hard to read, but I believe we must read them to keep ourselves mindful of the racist and vicious things that happen every day, to speak out when we see discrimination, and root out its evil from ourselves.